On 24/01/2014 21:40, Andrew Cunningham wrote:
>
> On 23/01/2014 8:30 AM, "Simon Sapin" <simon.sapin@exyr.org
> <mailto:simon.sapin@exyr.org>> wrote:
> >
> > On 22/01/2014 12:25, Phillips, Addison wrote:
> >>
>
> > I personally don’t care about being friendly to authors who are not
> using UTF-8.
> >
> > The only thing we should teach authors is "Use UTF-8, period."
> >
>
> Considering NO web browser supports all of Unicode and NO web browser
> supports a wide enough range of languages...
Could you explain what you mean by that?
> It begs the question why should utf-8 be used exclusively ?
>
> I would prefer to use utf-8 exclusively. But I have to work with a wide
> range of languages. Some have limited or no support even though they are
> in Unicode. Some aren't even in Unicode yet. Some need missing
> characters added to Unicode before they could be widely used.
>
> Some can only be implemented as Graphite fonts, OpenType implentations
> aren't up to rendering them yet.
What encoding would you use instead of UTF-8? How does it help?
UTF-8 (which is only about the byte representation of abstract code
points) supports the full range of Unicode. This is not at all related
to whether a given font stack supports shaping or other features for a
given language.
As to languages that are not in Unicode yet, the fix is to add them to
Unicode. This is not a responsibility for CSS Syntax. Text on the Web is
fundamentally based on Unicode, this is not gonna change.
In any case, it’s fine that you use a different encoding if you think
you have a good reason to do so. That doesn’t change that we should
teach the vast majority of web authors to just use UTF-8.
--
Simon Sapin